In 1969, there was a Boss. And it wasn't Bruce Springsteen.

At about 6 p.m. on a rainy Halloween in 1969, I took delivery of a chrome-yellow 1970 Mustang Boss 302 from Dan Rohyans Ford in Columbus, Ohio. I don’t know what my father was thinking. He dropped me off, thus installing me—age 18—behind the wheel of a violent muscle car on the one night the wet streets were guaranteed to be clogged with hugely distracted children in dark clothing. Why not also toss in a bottle of Wild Turkey and a suitcase full of thermite?

Truth is, I was so thrilled to be sitting in the Mustang that my hands were shaking, and I drove home at an average speed of maybe 12 mph, then unilaterally expropriated half of my parents’ garage and locked the door. I’ve had four decades to think about that car, and I can safely tell you this: No material object has given me greater pleasure nor more dramatically shaped my life.

Of course, driving the Boss around town was often a festival of misery. Its concrete-heavy, recirculating-medicine-ball steering gave me Popeye-style forearms. The huge ports and valves sabotaged almost all power below 4000 rpm. Lance Armstrong’s left leg was necessary to depress the clutch. My mother drove the car once and refused ever after to set foot in it, partly because the “Detroit Locker” limited-slip differential banged and clunked and whined as if it might momentarily rip asunder.

Car and Driver's 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302 project car

After driving the car for about a month, I abandoned girls, algebra, sports, and TV. That’s when I dedicated my very existence to making the Boss faster. First came a set of Hooker headers. Then an oil cooler, a Schiefer lightweight flywheel, Koni shocks, eight-inch-wide wheels, a brake proportioning valve, hood pins, a brace between the front shock towers, a Shelby intake manifold capped by two Holley four-barrels capable of fouling the plugs at stoplights, and a flimsy dune-buggy bucket seat that should have killed me. When I installed the roll bar, I told my dad, “I’ve got no choice but to gut the cockpit,” and that’s when he stopped looking in the garage for anything at all, including the shovel he should have swung at my forehead.

Then I attended driving school in Canada and began racing the Mustang at Nelson Ledges, Mosport, Mid-Ohio, and a bunch of tracks that are now strip malls.

So, imagine my delight, in January of 1970, to read a C/D feature called “The Flagmen Say Car 9’s Stereo Is Too Loud,” in which my hero senior editor Brock Yates had likewise chosen a ’70 Boss 302 to enter in an SCCA race at Watkins Glen. He equipped his Ford-supplied press car with straight-through exhausts, racing plugs, and not much else—not even a spare tire—hoping to prove the Boss was raceworthy with little more than 10 gallons of Sunoco 260.

There were two heats. Of Heat One, Yates wrote: “As we tried to overtake a trio of slower Corvettes, one had popped a water hose, the second driver had spiked his brakes, and the third had thumped him in the tail and spun . . . He tried to steer his bucking Corvette back onto the track without regaining control. He bounced through a ditch and blundered, bull-like, into the side of the Boss 302, bunted it sideways and then slammed into a dirt bank. The left door and rear fender had been bashed in . . . the driver’s window had been shattered.”

In Heat Two, the Boss—battle-scarred and bloodied—nonetheless finished second. Then Yates drove it back to Detroit in a cold rain that pelted the left side of his face for 400 miles. What fun.

I dashed off a sycophantic note pronto, breathlessly informing Yates that I was similarly racing a 1970 Boss 302 but had not yet humiliated any B-Production Shelby GT350s or Corvettes. To my astonishment, he responded with a handwritten letter that included this: “Yes, indeed, an outing that will be remembered, especially by Ford’s PR team, who appeared somewhat agitated to learn that I had reconfigured the Mustang’s contours and dispensed with its side windows . . . an outing that will also be remembered eternally by me and my family if I find myself unemployed because of it.” (That’s from memory. I’d have given it to you verbatim, but I lost the original letter the night I read it aloud at Yates’s unofficial retirement party in 2006. My guess is that it’s near his pool fence, against which I was steadying myself while simultaneously clutching a Corona and vomiting.)

In an unlikely but gratifying way, my life has come full circle. As a kid, I so admired C/D that I enshrined the magazine’s June 1969 Boss 302 preview in a scrapbook that I still possess. What are the odds that, 42 years later, I’d be the C/D staffer assigned to chronicle the 2012 Boss 302? What are the odds that any car would lead to a career so overflowing with fun and a small amount of vomit.